The engraver and lithographer

Munch's first graphic works date from 1894. He began with dry point, but quickly became interested in technical experiments and, like Goya, combined etching and aquatint on the same plate. Using this method, and treating the surface of the copper with resin, he was able to obtain a washlike appearance in which the drawing is partially accentuated by the bite of the acid. Sometimes, as in the first version of The Sick Child, he combines aquatint and dry point, while in The Kiss (in which a nude man and a woman, standing, embrace in front of a window) all three methods are combined.
He used lithography and the woodcut to translate the principal subjects of his painting into prints. Thus each theme is repeated in several versions that involve variations and sometimes a change of title. Munch has been charged with carelessness in limiting his printings. Approximately seventeen thousand printings have been made of the 800-odd plates he bequeathed to the city of Oslo. For Munch, however, the success of whose painting always ended at the frontiers of his native land, the print was a more certain means of publicizing his work.

The Kiss

The Kiss

The Kiss

He returned to France (chiefly Paris, but he also stopped in Nice) in 1895 and 1896, and exhibited at the Salon des Independants, the Salon de l'Art Nouveau, and Bing's Gallery. The new trends being welcomed by Bing to his gallery were to be reflected in Munch's painting and lithographs, particularly in Jealousy (1896), one of the themes he depicted in a number of versions, and the subject of an article published by his friend Strindberg in La Revue Blanche. Several Parisian publishers now became aware of Munch's work. The lithograph Anxiety, printed in black and red by Clot, was published by Vollard under the title (subsequently abandoned) of Evening in his first Album des Peintres Graveurs, while the Cent Bibliophiles commissioned him to illustrate an edition of Flowers of Evil.
He became friendly with Stephane Mallarme, and did two portraits of him, one engraved in soft varnish, the other a lithograph. In a letter of June 15, 1896, Mallarme thanks him for the «discerning portrait in which I intimately feel my own presence.» In the same year a Munch lithograph illustrated the program for Ibsen's Peer Gynt, played at the Theatre de l'Oeuvre. A portrait of August Strindberg done by the same method also dates from 1896.
Munch experimented with interesting innovations in the woodcut technique, to which he devoted a great deal of time during his stay in Paris. Some of his prints combine wood block, stone, and zinc plate, that is, a combination of xylography and lithography. He also engraved zinc in sufficient depth to produce relief prints. Using two or three wooden blocks for color printings, he obtained interesting effects through the contrast of crude chisel work and extremely refined coloring. An example of this is Moonlight (1896), in which he repeated the subject of an 1893 painting: a female figure standing in front of a wooden house. (In the engraving the composition is reversed, as is generally the case in works by Munch, who used his designs without concern for the reversal caused by the transferral from the plate to the paper.) The painter's interest in these graphic works increased with the passing years, and they continued to form a major and by no means less original part of his work.

Peer Gynt

A new style

The years between 1892 and 1898 constitute the period of the affirmation of Munch's most personal character, the period in which he created his major works. His development, however, did not follow an unbroken line. Perhaps he was somewhat uncertain about his aesthetic research; perhaps he wanted to pursue various technical experiments simultaneously. In any event, within a single year we find him painting works in different styles and with a variety of treatments. This makes our task more difficult when we attempt to grasp the essence underlying the instability of Munch's activity.
Thus it is surprising that a canvas like Spring Evening on Karl Johan Street, Oslo, in which a new, extremely original, and extremely Expressionist style appears, was painted in 1892, that is, one year before Puberty and prior to the portrait Dagny Juell Przybyszetvska, the style of which is so much closer to the less coloristic canvases of the preceding years. We would be tempted to believe in an error of dating but for the reappearance, in 1894-1895, of pictures like The Day After, the style of which is similar to that of Puberty.
One apparent interpretation of this procedure of «three steps forward, two steps back» is that Munch experienced significant difficulty in tearing himself away from his past, to which he returns in his style of painting and his repetition of subjects he had painted in his youth. The most typical example in this connection is his Two Women on the Shore (1935; Munch Museet, Oslo), a repetition — in greatly impoverished style — of a theme of 1898.

Spring Evening on Karl Johan Street, Oslo

The Day After

The Day After

Omega and the Bear

We must therefore discern an aesthetic movement in his development that, by its pictorial quality and the number of works it produced, dominates all his other works painted, so to speak, against the current. This movement begins in 1892 with Spring Evening on Karl Johan Street, continues in 1893 with The Scream and Death in the Sick Chamber, and continues with a certain number of canvases painted between these dates and 1908, which we shall now examine. (What happened after 1908 is another matter, and will be discussed later.)
Munch's new style, which appeared in 1892, imparts a very precise meaning to the word Expressionism and what it meant for him: the statement of an emotion, the capturing of a paroxysmal moment in which we are given a glimpse of an inner upheaval the secret of which is not revealed by its image. For Munch conceals from us the reason for this emotion. We never learn what has motivated the action of The Scream. In Death in the Sick Chamber the patient remains invisible in his distant bed surrounded by grieving members of his family. And we are given no information about the reasons for the anxiety on the faces, seen in frontal view, of the strollers in Spring Evening on Karl Johan Street. Here the anxiety is not «cried out»; it remains silent, hence all the more disturbing. In the distance, the lighted windows of a house seem to complement the unusual lighting of the wan faces.
This kind of modesty in the rejection of any explanation — perhaps out of the artist's fear of revealing the reasons for his own anxiety — added to the mystery of the composition, gives Munch's works a resonance that is missing from the works of the other Expressionists.
The figures in Spring Evening on Karl Johan Street reappear in 1894 in the painting entitled Anxiety, and in an 1896 lithograph, Feeling of Anxiety, which we prefer to the canvas because of its more incisive draftsmanship. But its landscape has now been transposed into the fjord of The Scream and the sinuous lines of its blood-red sky. These constant transitions from one technique to another, modifications in the components of a work, changes of title, and repetitions of theme show that for Munch a subject was not exhausted in a single painting, and that the characters and landscapes are not the principal subjects but simply the interpreters of a more concealed implication that tends to establish a fusion on the canvas of the anxieties Munch himself felt and those to which all human beings are subject. Every individual event then takes on the dimensions of an allegorical representation.

Death in the Sick Chamber

Anxiety

Cenizas II

Ashes

Thus Laura (1899), the portrait of a woman lost in sadness, became Melancholia, and morose couples dancing by a riverbank acquired the title of The Dance of Life.
A closer examination of Munch's paintings, moreover, projects a stranger light on them if we consider the consistency with which certain details appear, like the signs or symbols of a persistent obsession. There is, for example, the shimmer of the moon, with its very unusual shape, always repeated in the same way. It appeared in 1893 in The Voice (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), in which its vertical line reinforces those of the trees and the young woman standing under them. It reappeared in 1895 in another version of the same subject and in two etchings on the Three Stages of Woman. In 1899-1900 it turned up in The Dance of Life, where it has a vaguely phallic appearance seemingly «acknowledged» ten years later by an identical line in a male nude that forms part of Chemistry, one of the decorative panels executed for the University of Oslo. The same motif appears yet again in 1900-1902 in Dance on the Shore and Summer Night at the Shore, in 1907 in The Moon and in another picture with the unequivocal title of Desire, representing three women on a beach who are looking at a group of three men on the left side of the composition. To conclude this by no means complete list, the persistent lunar reflection is included in several drawings of 1908.

Melancholia

Melancholia

Melancholia

The Dance of Life